1.
The
philosophes were a heterogeneous group of eighteenth-century
intellectuals, including (François Marie Arouet) Voltaire,
(Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de)
Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert,
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
the German-born Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach in France;
along with Cesare Beccaria and Gianbattista Vico in Italy; Gotthold
Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant in the German lands;
David Hume, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon in Britain; and the Americans
Benjamin Franklin, as well as Condorcet's near contemporaries
Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. The philosophes
maintained wide-ranging interests in science, mechanics, literature,
philosophy, medicine, physiology, religion, society and politics. They
were, “above all, critics, aiming to put human
intelligence to use as an engine for understanding human nature, for
analyzing man as a sociable being, and the natural environment in which
he lived.” (Porter 2001, 3) In contrast to the stereotypical
philosopher of today, they were overwhelmingly “men of the world:
journalists, propagandists, activists, seeking not just to understand
the world but to change it” (Ibid.) Modern social science also
traces its roots to the thought of this period, widely known as the
Enlightenment, especially to the search for a true
‘science of man,’ to be grounded in empirical methods and
observation and devoted to the goal of human progress.

2.
For Jean-Pierre
Schandeler, Condorcet is surely one of those “who are born
posthumously” in Nietzsche's memorable self-reference in
The Anti-Christ (Schandeler 2000, 1). Despite having
achieved “something approaching iconic status in European
political circles,” by the end of his life, according to his most
recent scholarly biographer David Williams, the following two hundred
years have been far less generous in its appraisal of his reputation.
As Williams (2004, 4–5, 7) remarks, “Condorcet must now surely be
counted in the ranks of the posthumous newly born. For him
posterity has really only just started” and even then, “the
birth of Condorcet's reputation, in the Nietzschean sense, has
… been a slowly evolving event…” In the
English-language world, the belated Condorcet reception was sparked by
the rediscovery of his work on probability theory and social
choice. (See Arrow 1963 [orig. 1951] and D. Black
1958). His place in social science and economic thought is
excellently presented by Baker 1975 and Rothschild 2001.
Williams’ splendid 2004 study is among the first to address in
full scope Condorcet's contribution to modern political
thought. Williams (2003) has also edited a French edition of
Condorcet's writings on race and he is preparing a translation
and edition of the Idées sur le despotisme to appear in
Volume II of the new Cambridge Reader in Western Political Thought,
edited by I. Harris and G. Parry.

3.
According to D.
Williams (2004, 159) “Condorcet saw Voltaire as an ally in the
matter of women's rights: ‘one of the men who has
shown most justice towards them, and who has understood them
best.’” Yet Voltaire never advocated publicly in defense of
women, as he did on the question of religious fanaticism and legal
injustice. Overall, as Williams points out, Voltaire's record on
women's rights is muted. Denis Diderot's
(posthumously published) Sur les femmes (1772) maintains that
women's inferiority is owed to their legal subordination and poor
education, a position shared by Baron d’Holbach's Des
Femmes (1773), published in the third volume of Le
Système social, ou Principes naturels de la morale et de la
politique, avec un examen de l’influence du gouvernement sur les
moeurs. L. Steinnbrügge (1995, 26) argues that the heavy
emphasis on women's biological nature in the
Encyclopédie owes much to their physiocratically
oriented social theory. “Woman's value as a
human being—like man's—lay in her usefulness to
society. This usefulness, however, lay not so much in the
productivity of her labor as in her biological capacity to produce
human life.” Furthermore, Trouille (1994, 192–193) finds in
Diderot's essay on woman a striking example of a
“pseudo-feminist rhetoric, that is, ”a subtle paternalism
and a tacit complicity with the status quo.” Despite his seeming
feminist rhetoric, she insists, Diderot offers no concrete proposals
nor does he evidence a genuine desire for change. On Montesquieu's
and Rousseau's views on women, see Landes 1988, part 1.

4.
This title was
given in the translation first published in England in 1912 as part of
the campaign for women's suffrage (The First Essay on the
Political Rights of Women, translated by Dr. Alice Drysdale
Vickery [Letchworth, 1912]), republished in Baker 1976, 97-104).
More recently, McLean and Hewitt (1994) have differently rendered
Condorcet's title as “On giving Women the Right of
Citizenship,” from which version I primarily cite in this
entry. However, the older, overly literal wording better conveys
in English the original title as it appeared in the Journal of the
Society of 1789 on 3 July 1790—Sur l’admission des
femmes au droits de la cité—as well as reminding
readers of the wording by which Condorcet's contribution came to
be known by earlier generations, thanks to Drysdale's frequently
reproduced version.

5.
His initial
interest in slavery has been accredited to his friendship with Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Tom Paine. His first interest in
these matters appears in his letters to Jefferson in 1773 (Williams
2006, 20). E. and R. Badinter find the first mark of interest in
the condition of blacks in a letter he addressed to Benjamin Franklin 2
December 1773: “Je voudrais bien savoir si dans les
colonies anglaises, il y a des Negres qui ayant eu leur liberté
y aient vécu sans se mêler avec les Blancs. Si leurs
enfants nègres nés libres et élevés comme
libres ont conserve l’esprit et le caractère nègre
ou ont pris le caractère européen”, to which
Benjamin Franklin replied, “The Negroes who are free live among
the white people, but are generally improvident and poor. I think
they are not deficient in natural understanding, but they have not the
advantage of education. They make good musicians” (cited in
Badinter 1988, 175n; cf. ibid., 175–78, and 297–307 comparing
his support for Jews, Blacks, and women). For a letter sent in 1791 by
Jefferson to Condorcet on the question of intellectual parity between
the races, see Jordan 1968, 452. For more on these matters,
see the critical edition of Condorcet's writings on race,
Williams 2003.

6.
Baker (1976,
xxvii–xxviii) correctly points out the programmatic distinction
between instruction and education in the title of
Condorcet's Memoirs on Public Instruction, a series of
articles published in 1791 in the journal
Bibliothèque de homme public (The Public Man's
Library). “Condorcet was invoking a
distinction fundamental to educational debate in the eighteenth
century. Education implied the formation of the whole
personality: the inculcation of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes through
control of the entire environment of youth, in accordance with the
model of communal education among the ancients. Many
revolutionaries were prepared to argue that such education was the only
effective method to form citizens worthy of the new state.
Instruction implied what we would normally think of today as
schooling: the communication of ideas, techniques, and skills
necessary for the conduct of everyday life, and the encouragement and
training of talent appropriate for the various occupations and
professions. This alone, Condorcet insisted, must constitute the
responsibility of government in a modern society.” Moreover,
according to Condorcet, the ancient ideal of communal education rested
on two assumptions which did not pertain to modern society: First, a
slave class, which in turn freed a small group of citizens to perform
civic functions; and second, the assumption that “citizens
existed only to be molded for service to the state.” Modern
social and economic differentiation “implies a need for a
differentiated system of public instruction to meet the needs of all
social classes, [wherein] the attempt to form all citizens in a
rigorously identical mold would be utterly inappropriate. It would
also be entirely contrary to the true principles of liberty—the
liberty of the individual thinking being to form his own
ideas—which the ancients never understood … The aim of
public instruction was to be limited to teaching men and women how to
think, not telling them what to think. ‘The Duty of the public
authority is to arm the full force of truth against error, which is
always a public evil. But it does not have the right to decide where
truth resides or where error is to be found’ [Memoir on
Public Instruction].” Condorcet presented his plan for
educational reform to the Legislative Assembly in April 1792.
“Although never adopted in the precise form proposed by
Condorcet,” observes Baker, “this educational plan
influenced the shape of French education throughout the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth” (Baker 1976, xxvii).

7. Given his aversion to
competitions, it is slightly incongruous (in practice, if not in
spirit) that since 1993, Le Prix Condorcet has been awarded in his
memory by the Mouvement laïque québécois
to honor a public person who has worked for the defense of secularism
(laïcité) and liberty of conscience (wikipedia.fr). In
1883 the Lycée Fontanes in Paris was renamed the Lycée
Condorcet. Among its illustrious alumni are Paul Verlaine, Henri
Bergson, François Poulenc, Eugène Haussmann, Marcel
Proust, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Raymond Aron, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, André Citroën, Jean Cocteau, Serge
Gainsbourg, Victor Schoelcher, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and William
Carlos Williams. Its famous teachers include Paul Bénichou,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stéphane Mallarmé.

8.
He is reported
to have remarked, “Quant à la religion, je conseille de
n’en point parler” (As for religion, I advise that we not
speak about it). Unpublished ms. 884, ff 46-47, in the
Bibliothèque de l’Institut, quoted in Albertone 1979, 35,
note 61, and in Rosenfield 1984, 5.

13.
Barbara
Brookes speculates that the lycée and the Condorcet salon were
important in offering an opportunity for serious study to women
otherwise deprived of a challenging education (Brookes 1980,
325). She also argues that Condorcet's increasingly radical view
of liberal democracy was accompanied by the extension of his ideas
about the political role of women” (Brookes, 327).

14.
Her
translation of Smith's essay on the origin of languages was
appended to the work when it was published in Paris in 1798. As
Deidre Dawson remarks, “For two centuries de Grouchy's was
the ‘definitive’ French translation of the Theory of
Moral Sentiments. The translators of the first new
French translation in over two hundred years acknowledge that the
elegance of de Grouchy's prose is still without equal”
(Dawson 2004, 267).

16.
Emerging in
fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe, and continuing long
thereafter, the “debate over woman” or the “woman
question”—literally the “quarrel over woman”—is
usually referred to its French phrase as the “querelle des
femmes”. Scholars, theologians, merchants and others voiced
their thoughts on all matter of things concerning women's role in
society: their ownership of property, the appropriateness of their
place at the head of state, their role in church, in owning property,
their sexuality, and, not least, their education and the intellect.
(See Poulain de la Barre 2002; Stuurman 2004; Fauré
1991; Harth 1992; Schiebinger 1991).

17.
Multiple
scholars detect Tom Paine's influence on the wording of the
program of reform in this text. See, for example, Badinter 1988,
234.

18.
It was in
this period that Condorcet contradicted his principles, as stated in
the 1787 Letters from a Newhaven Bourgeois, as well as the
peaceable assumptions underlying his draft plan for egalitarian public
education by voting for war.